DaedTech

GitHub and Easy Moq

GitHub

Not too long ago, I signed up for GitHub. I had always used subversion for source control when given the choice, but the distributed nature of Git appealed to me, particularly since I often do work on a variety of different machines. GitHub itself appealed to me because it seemed like the perfect venue for reusable code that I’ve created over the years and tend to bring with me from project to project. Here is a unique idea – sites like Sourceforge want to store code by basic unit of “project” whereas GitHub wants code for the sake of code. This code need not be finished or polished or distributed on any kind of release schedule. That is perfect for a lot of my portable code.

One thing that I noticed about GitHub upon arrival was the lack of .NET work there, compared with other technologies. There is some, but not a lot. Presumably this is because sites like Code Project already offer this kind of thing to the .NET community. After reading about Phil Haack leaving Microsoft to be GitHub’s Windows Ambassador, I decided that this was a good indicator that GitHub was serious about growing that portion of its user base, and that I’d start porting some of my code there.

Another thing that I’d read about git before trying it out was that it has a steep learning curve. To back my general impression of this as a widely held opinion, I did a quick google search and ran across this post.

Given the steep learning curve many (including myself) experience with Git, I think I can safely assume that many other people have this sort of problem with it.

So, there’s at least one person who has experienced a steep learning curve and at least one other person with the same general sense as me about many finding the learning curve steep.

I must say, I haven’t found this to be the case. Perhaps it’s my comfort with Linux command line interaction or perhaps it’s my years of experience using and administering SVN, but whatever it is, I read the GitHub primer and was up and running. And, I don’t mean that I was up and running with commits to my local repository, but I was up and running committing, pushing to GitHub, and pulling that source to a second computer where I was able to build and run it. Granted, I haven’t forked/branched/merged yet, but after a day of using it, I was at the point where the source control system retreated into the mental background where it belongs, serving as a tool I’m taking for granted rather than a mental obstacle (by contrast, even with a couple of years of experience with Rational Clear Case, I still have to set aside extra development time to get it to do what I want, but I digress, since I don’t believe that’s a simple case of needling to mount a learning curve). So, after a day, I’m developing according to my schedule and running a commit when I feel like taking a break and/or a push when I want to update GitHub’s version. I’m sure I’ll be hitting google or StackOverflow here and there, but so far so good.

Easy Moq

So, what am I doing with my first GitHub project? It’s something that I’m calling Easy Moq. I use Moq as my main mocking framework, as I’ve mentioned before, and I’ve had enough time with it to find that I have a certain set of standard setup patterns. Over the course of time, I’ve refined these to the point where they become oft-repeated boilerplate, and I’ve abstracted this boilerplate into various methods and other utilities that I use. Up until now, this has varied a bit as I go, and I email it to myself or upload the classes to my web server or something like that.

But, I’m tired of this hodgepodge approach, and this seems like the perfect use case for trying out GitHub. So, I’m looking over my various projects and my use of Moq and creating my own personal Easy Moq library. If others find it useful, so much the better – please feel free to keep up with it, fork it, add to it, etc.

At the time of writing, I have three goals in mind (these may change as I TDD my way through and start eating my own dog food on real projects). In no particular order:

Be able to create and use my doubles with the semantics Dummy() or new Spy() rather than new Mock().Object

Be able to generate an actual class under test with all dependencies mocked as Dummy, Stub, Spy, etc.

For the first goal, I’ll refer to Niraj’s take on the taxonomy of test doubles. I haven’t yet decided exactly how I’ll define the particular doubles, but the ideas in that post are good background for my aims. Up to this point, if I want to create one of these things with Moq, I instantiate the double in the same fashion and my setup differs. I’d like to make the declaration semantics more expressive — declaring a DummyMock is more expressive as to your intent with the test than creating a Mock and doing nothing else to set it up. For more complicated doubles, this also has the pleasant effect of eliminating manual boilerplate like “SetupAllProperties()”.

For the second goal, this is probably lowest priority, but I’d like to be able to think of the doubles as entities unto themselves rather than wrappers that contain the entity that I want. It may seem like a small thing, but I’m a bit of a stickler (fanatic at times) for clear, declarative semantics.

For the third part, it’d be nice to add a dependency to a class and not have to go back and slaughter test classes with “Find and Replace” to change all calls to new Foo(bar) to new Foo(bar, baz), along with Baz’s setup overhead, particularly when those old tests, by definition, do not care about Baz. I realize that there is already a tool designed to do this (called AutoMoq), but it appears to be for use specifically with Unity. And besides, this is more about me organizing and standardizing my own existing code as well as getting to know GitHub.

So, that’s my first pet project contribution to Git Hub. If anyone gets any mileage out of it, Cheers.